‘CALL ME BY YOUR NAME’
R 2:12 H H H H
The pleasures of art, music, food, natural beauty and sexual awakening are evoked and celebrated in “Call Me by Your Name,” an almost sinfully enjoyable movie that both observes and obeys the languid rhythms of a torrid Italian summer.
Set in the early 1980s, Luca Guadanigno’s adaptation of André Aciman’s 2007 novel barely counts as a period piece, although the short shorts and tube socks Armie Hammer wears to play his smart-jock protagonist put the story squarely in the past. Still, the themes of longing, desire and self-definition are nothing if not timeless. Here, a young man’s coming-of-age is given such tactile, emotionally resonant immediacy that it would be recognizable in any country, of any era.
The young man in question is Elio (Timothee Chalamet), the 17-year-old son of an archaeology professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) who has hired an American student named Oliver (Hammer) to be his assistant for the summer. As a typically self-absorbed teenager, Elio at first seems barely aware of Oliver’s presence, being far more interested in his on-and-off girlfriend, reading and pursuing compositional musings on the guitar and piano.
For his part, Oliver embodies a purely American brand of unbridled appetite and unselfconscious confidence that strikes an immediate awkward note within Elio’s casually cosmopolitan family. Soon, though, the household reaches its own pleasant rhythm, with the two young men — about seven years apart in age — gravitating toward one another as friends and, eventually, more.
Before readers look up the Italian word for “problematic,” let it be noted that it is Elio, not Oliver, who is the pursuer in “Call Me By Your Name,” which was written for the screen by James Ivory. Balancing the objectification of its leading men with discretion and delicacy, this is a film that acknowledges the purity and sculptural beauty of youth — Greek aesthetics, philosophy and ideals of male friendship are invoked early and often — but never at the expense of a character who, on the cusp of manhood, possesses his own agency and desires, despite their sometimes shaky parameters.
Portrayed with a noteperfect combination of cocky self-assurance and wary naiveté by Chalamet, Elio is something of an extension of the actor’s hilariously pretentious character in the recent film “Lady Bird” — another teenager with pedantic ideas about his own depth and seriousness. But while Ivory and Guadanigno aren’t afraid to wink at Elio’s youthful lack of self-awareness, they never stoop to ridiculing it.
“Call Me By Your Name” finds the director marshaling those gifts in service to a spellbinding, almost ecstatically beautiful movie that gains even more heft and meaning in its final transcendent moments. What had been a two-hander featuring sensitive, flawlessly judged performances by Chalamet and Hammer expands into something more, and the audience realizes that the entire film could be interpreted as an elegant exercise in misdirection.
“Call Me By Your Name” may exemplify well-tempered cinema at its most balanced and attractive, but it’s far more than just a pretty face.
Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg. (Sexual content, nudity and some language)